Although Clinton Won Massachusetts by 2%, Hand Counted Precincts in Massachusetts Favored Bernie Sanders by 17%

Massachusetts, one of the participating states for the Super Tuesday election results, may need further scrutiny to allay concerns over election fraud using electronic voting machines. 68 out of the state’s 351 jurisdictions used hand counted ballots and showed a much larger preference of 17% for Bernie Sanders than the rest of the jurisdictions tabulated by electronic voting machine vendors ES&S, Diebold and Dominion. Hillary Clinton was declared the winner of Massachusetts by 1.42 %.

Jim March and John Brakey stand outside of LHS headquarters in Massachusetts while LHS employees load Diebold machines into their hatchback.

Election integrity activists John Brakey and Jim March investigated Scott Brown’s upset victory over Martha Coakley to replace Senator Ted Kennedy’s seat in 2010. They found a similar difference between hand counted paper ballots and those jurisdictions using machine tabulators. At that time, 71 out of 351 voting districts were using hand counted ballots and they favored Coakley over Brown by 4.44% despite Brown’s declared victory throughout the state by 5%.

Brakey and March discovered that election officials tend to have an unsettling reliance on election vendors. In fact, when one election official in Boston was asked if it was possible to examine their database files (called mdb, which is short for Microsoft data base files), that official then asked, “What are mdb files?” Those that understand the process know that mdb files are an integral part of the tabulation process that should be overseen by the election officials. March and Brakey were told by this election official that “the vendors handle that stuff” (I was with them during this exchange). Another common statement repeated by officials in Diebold precincts was: “We don’t have Diebold here, we have AccuVote”. They simply don’t know that Diebold’s optical scanners are called “AccuVote”. In addition, LHS, the company that represents Diebold, actually have their vendors’ technicians loading the memory cards prior to tabulating the results.

Why are hand counted jurisdictions so far out of step with the rest of the State of Massachusetts? The smaller precincts appear to be from more rural, less densely populated areas of the state. As Jonathon Simon, a Massachusetts resident and author of the book “Code Red”, suggests:

The Clinton/Sanders numbers in MA are obviously egregious, a much greater Opscan/Handcount disparity than the 8% in Coakley/Brown. The problem is that for Coakley/Brown we had some very good baselines (prior noncompetitive Senate contests and a prior noncompetitive Coakley race for AG, as well as Registration by Party). I’m not aware of any baselines for Clinton/Sanders, so we face the problem of demonstrating that those crazy rural (and whiter) Democrats in MA didn’t just “feel the Bern.” It is not particularly intuitive that Handcountville went legitimately so much stronger for Bernie, but we all know where “intuitive” conclusions get us with media/pols/public!

What would be powerful … would be the selection of a few suspect precincts for full hand-count to compare with the Dominion numbers.

From the chart below, you can see that Dominion jurisdictions favored Clinton over Sanders by 5%. As more people are becoming aware of the potential for rigging in electronic voting technology, they are speaking out publicly and addressing campaigns by urging them to scrutinize election results. Beth Clarkson, a well know statistician in Kansas, has discovered from graphs of Oklahoma primary results that “as the number of votes cast in a precinct increases, so does the vote share for the candidate favored by the Washington establishment.” She believes this pattern is “consistent with election rigging” and she has written an open letter to warn Bernie Sanders. Other Sanders fans seem attuned to election fraud and began circulating petitions demanding an audit of the Iowa Caucus, which prematurely declared Clinton as the victor in that states caucus vote.

Regardless of who your prize candidate may be, it’s time to get on your hind legs and demand verifiable transparent elections, especially if your candidate is not the establishment’s choice.

Our 30 Full Voting Rights require the election official to perform (1) 100% Closing count
by hand (preferred) or by machine, (2) 100% Verify count by hand only immediately
after the Closing count. And (3) Recount etc.

Lets look at our “30 FULL Voting Rights”….

As you know our country is 239 years old and no voter
in any of our 50 states has their “30 FULL Voting Rights”
regardless of the voter’s personal and/or political
persuasions.

History:

(1) Men were given some undefined voting rights since
the founding of our country… but, full voting rights
were not defined.

(2) In 1920 it was decided to let women vote… but,
full voting rights were not granted/defined.

(3) In 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) was enacted to
purportedly provide voting rights to many minority
folks… but, only about 7 of the 30 full voting rights
are barely mentioned in the VRA.

(4) Today the average voter knows of 4 of the 30 full
voting rights:
1) register to vote…
2) get ballot on election day…
3) mark ballot in secret (in a booth)…
4) place ballot in ballot box or voting machine..

What are the “30 FULL Voting Rights”….

Here is a list of the many components/rights of
each individual’s “Full Voting Rights”, the some
30 rights are:

” FULL VOTING RIGHTS ”

1) Districts of equal number of electors/voters.

2) Registration by US citizens only, age 18 and up
( note; the citizen has the right to register
or not to register … no one shall be allowed
to ‘automatically’ register any voter).

3) Registration list 100% open to public view on-line.

4) There shall be equal requirements for placing
candidates name on the ballot by the individual
candidate only. Political parties and other
groups shall not be allowed to place names of
candidates on the ballot. The government (fed,
state, local) shall conduct only one election,
that is the government will not conduct primaries,
run-off elections, top two elections etc other
than the general election itself. Government may
hold special election to fill vacancies as may be
required. The winner of each race is the person who
receives the most votes cast. A tie shall be resolved
by a Verify hand count and if this count results
into a tie, the tie can be resolved by “flip of coin”
or other non-skilled chance process. All candidates
shall be given one line under his/her name to place
their party affiliation or short message/slogan.
Number of spaces/characters for this one line shall
be per election laws/procedures. All elections for
offices (fed, state, local) shall be based on one
person per district…there shall be no two or more
persons at-large type districts.

5) Equal requirements for placing questions on ballot.

6) All write-in-votes to be honored, counted (and not
bound to a gov pre-ordained list). (If write-in receive
most/sufficient votes, he/she can , if a qualified
elector, wins.)

7) Campaigns:…Gov (fed, state, local) shall stay out
of campaigns.

8) Absentee and, Early voting…Yes. But, NO early
counting.

9) NO all mail voting.

10) NO on-line voting.

11) Bring ALL unopened absentee/early ballots to
precinct polling place on election day.

12) Precincts shall consist of 3000 or less
registered voters.

13) Precinct polling place should be kept at a
constant location.

14) Precinct polling place shall be near the
voter…not 50 miles away from the where voters live.

24) Perform a VERIFY COUNT hand count of every
vote on every ballot before the CLOSING COUNT
team goes home by a Verify team or the Closing
team, looking for voter’s intent, generate
verification tally sheets and reports containing
results and error rate info..

25) Release official count results to the public.

…….(Recounts):

26) Any registered voter may request for recount.

27) Automatic recount of close positions if the margin
is at (0.5% plus error rate) or less.

28) Recount cost shall be covered by election budget.

29) Refundable fee based on margin plus error rate may
be levied on the requester prior to the recount.
(Refund if outcome changes.) (Count all positions for
office race being recounted.)

31) If any elector/voter spots an error at any
milestone event they have five work days to bring
challenge of the error to official of the milestone
or to court for corrective review and/or action.
The elector/voter shall not be charged any fees/cost.

…….(ELECTION CONTEST):

32) Any elector/voter/candidate/official is allow to
contest an election by bringing their case to a court;
and their cost shall be refunded/covered if and to
degree of win.

Notes:

1. This list is not cast in stone, you can add/change
rights to this list.

2. Right # 19: (says mark ballot in secret ) is the
ONLY ‘step’ closed to public view. All other rights/steps
shall be open to public view by electors/voters/press/the
public…etc.

3. In right # 27 the phrase “error rate” means the error
rate, expressed in percentage that is indicated in the
Verification Report (right #24) or the historic high
which ever is the greater.

4. In right # 29 phrase “error rate”…same as note 3.

5. In right # 29 the word “margin” means the gap between
the two positions being requested of a recount expressed
in percentage.

6. When the “30 Full Voting Rights” are in place
two good things may/can occur. …. (1) All political
parties, campaigns, individuals, etc can promote their
choices for offices without interference from government
(fed, state, local). … And, (2) all voters will have
an election system that honors their “30 Full Voting
Rights” without interference from government, political
parties, campaigns, candidates, individuals, etc.

Those e-voting, e-scanning machines owned by the extreme right, remove or hide real evidence of paper ballots on purpose, and the purpose is to hide election theft. The real evidence is paper ballots publicly hand counted and posted in precinct on election night which is much harder to steal.

Bernie Sanders wants hand counted paper ballot evidence in elections. We need to help him with that.

This year, however, the primary season is shaping up to be a battle royal between the political establishment and outsider insurgencies who are challenging the party elites and defying their usual filters, money and manipulations. And it seems all bets are off.
snip
Threats to the 2016 Elections
In 2016, Americans will once again cast their votes into this lawless electronic void, and no, we can’t solve the problem before these game-changing primary elections. But shining a light on our voting systems does make a difference – as does getting out to vote: Voter apathy and ignorance create the ideal conditions for election rigging. Huge turnout makes election rigging less feasible, particularly when the pre-election polls or exit polls diverge more than 10 percent from actual vote returns. Manipulations usually happen when the spread between candidates is smaller than 10 percent.
snip
The good news is that voting machines are failing nationwide, 14 years after states bought most of them with $3.9 billion from the 2002 Help America Vote Act (HAVA).

Most counties no longer have HAVA funds to replace their aged and malfunctioning machines. Citizens now have the chance to examine their voting systems anew, hopefully with the will not to repeat past mistakes.

Concerned voters and public officials should form task forces in every state and election jurisdiction to push for reforms that secure our elections. Only publicly controlled, transparent vote counting fulfills the conditions of democracy – if democracy is what we want.

Visit the National Election Defense Coalition’s website ( http://www.electiondefense.org/ ) to learn more about how to reform our elections process.
……………….

Certainly the outlook for democracy seems pretty bleak—and how could it be otherwise? The surest way to make a problem worse is to pretend it isn’t there, which is exactly what our press and politicians have been doing; and the rest is, unfortunately, history.

But history can be changed, as We the People have continually learned, from our refusal of colonial subjection, to our (partial) establishment as a democratic republic, to the abolition of slavery, to the enfranchisement of women, to the end of formal segregation and the passage of the Voting Rights Act.

After that, our progress seemed to stop, and it must now resume: for history can be changed, and for the better, but only through our own unbreakable commitment to, and action for, enlightened policies for the renewal of our democracy. Based squarely on America’s first principles, such policies would not be wholly new, however revolutionary they must sound in these bad, backward times. As it was certain policies that got us into this horrific situation, certain other policies can get us out.

The fact is that We the People are in lousy shape, and must get straight as soon as possible. For we are all addicted to the horse race—and we can’t win, because it’s fixed. And so, before we end up losing everything, we need to pull ourselves together, face the music, and then take all necessary steps to change the tune.

A 12-Step Program to Save US Democracy

1. Repeal the Help America Vote Act (HAVA).
This step will inevitably follow an in-depth investigation of how HAVA came to be.

2. Replace all electronic voting with hand-counted paper ballots (HCPB).
Although politicians and the press dismiss this idea as utopian, the people would support it just as overwhelmingly as national health care, strong environmental measures, US withdrawal from Iraq, and other sane ideas.

3. Get rid of computerized voter rolls.
It isn’t just the e-voting machines that are obstructing our self-government. According to USA Today, thousands of Americans have had their names mysteriously purged from the electronic databases now used nationwide as records of our registration.

4. Keep all private vendors out of our elections.
With their commercial interests, trade secrets and unaccountable proceedings, private companies should have no role in the essential process of republican self-government.

5. Make it illegal for the TV networks to declare who won before the vote-count is complete.
Certainly the corporate press will scream about its First Amendment Rights, but they don’t have the right to interfere with our elections. When they declare a winner when we don’t yet even know if the election was legitimate, they delegitimize all audits, recounts and even first counts of the vote as the mere desperate measures of “sore losers.”

6. Set up an exit polling system, publicly supported, to keep the vote-counts honest.
Only in America are exit poll results not meant to help us gauge the accuracy of the official count. Here they are meant only to allow the media to make its calls.

7. Get rid of voter registration rules, by allowing every citizen to register, at any post office, on his/her 18th birthday.
Either we believe in universal suffrage or we don’t.

8. Ban all state requirements for state-issued ID’s at the polls.
As the Supreme Court smiles on such Jim Crow devices, we need a law, or Constitutional amendment, to forbid them.

10. Have Election Day declared a federal holiday, requiring all employers to allow their workers time to vote.
No citizens of the United States should ever lose the right to vote because they have to go to work.

11. Make it illegal for Secretaries of State to co-chair political campaigns (or otherwise assist or favor them).
Katherine Harris wore both those hats in Florida in 2000, and, four years later, so did Ken Blackwell in Ohio and Jan Brewer in Arizona. Such Republicans should not have been allowed to do it, nor should any Democrats.

12. Make election fraud a major felony, with life imprisonment–and disenfranchisement–for all repeat offenders.
“Three strikes and you’re out” would certainly befit so serious a crime against democracy.

This comes from Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy, 2000-2008, a new collection of writings by the major Election Integrity people, which IG Publishing will be bringing out in early April.

5 and 10 are childish and ridiculous. Government muzzling of the press is an abhorrent fascist idea, and there can be no “federal” holiday when each party on each state is free to hold its primary (or caucus) whenever it wishes.

cw YOU are ridiculous! It is right on point that the press should not be allowed to declare a winner until the election is finished. It tampers the process by validating that which may be false. Think of it as a copyright on any and all information having to do w elections. Once the results are certified than the press can have at it.

Furthermore- yes all federal elections should be national holiday. They should also be a two day affair w one day being that of a weekend. The states should make whatever day they choose a holiday in their own respective cases.

Certainly the outlook for democracy seems pretty bleak—and how could it be otherwise? The surest way to make a problem worse is to pretend it isn’t there, which is exactly what our press and politicians have been doing; and the rest is, unfortunately, history.

But history can be changed, as We the People have continually learned, from our refusal of colonial subjection, to our (partial) establishment as a democratic republic, to the abolition of slavery, to the enfranchisement of women, to the end of formal segregation and the passage of the Voting Rights Act.

After that, our progress seemed to stop, and it must now resume: for history can be changed, and for the better, but only through our own unbreakable commitment to, and action for, enlightened policies for the renewal of our democracy. Based squarely on America’s first principles, such policies would not be wholly new, however revolutionary they must sound in these bad, backward times. As it was certain policies that got us into this horrific situation, certain other policies can get us out.

The fact is that We the People are in lousy shape, and must get straight as soon as possible. For we are all addicted to the horse race—and we can’t win, because it’s fixed. And so, before we end up losing everything, we need to pull ourselves together, face the music, and then take all necessary steps to change the tune.

A 12-Step Program to Save US Democracy

1. Repeal the Help America Vote Act (HAVA).
This step will inevitably follow an in-depth investigation of how HAVA came to be.

2. Replace all electronic voting with hand-counted paper ballots (HCPB).
Although politicians and the press dismiss this idea as utopian, the people would support it just as overwhelmingly as national health care, strong environmental measures, US withdrawal from Iraq, and other sane ideas.

3. Get rid of computerized voter rolls.
It isn’t just the e-voting machines that are obstructing our self-government. According to USA Today, thousands of Americans have had their names mysteriously purged from the electronic databases now used nationwide as records of our registration.

4. Keep all private vendors out of our elections.
With their commercial interests, trade secrets and unaccountable proceedings, private companies should have no role in the essential process of republican self-government.

5. Make it illegal for the TV networks to declare who won before the vote-count is complete.
Certainly the corporate press will scream about its First Amendment Rights, but they don’t have the right to interfere with our elections. When they declare a winner when we don’t yet even know if the election was legitimate, they delegitimize all audits, recounts and even first counts of the vote as the mere desperate measures of “sore losers.”

6. Set up an exit polling system, publicly supported, to keep the vote-counts honest.
Only in America are exit poll results not meant to help us gauge the accuracy of the official count. Here they are meant only to allow the media to make its calls.

7. Get rid of voter registration rules, by allowing every citizen to register, at any post office, on his/her 18th birthday.
Either we believe in universal suffrage or we don’t.

8. Ban all state requirements for state-issued ID’s at the polls.
As the Supreme Court smiles on such Jim Crow devices, we need a law, or Constitutional amendment, to forbid them.

10. Have Election Day declared a federal holiday, requiring all employers to allow their workers time to vote.
No citizens of the United States should ever lose the right to vote because they have to go to work.

11. Make it illegal for Secretaries of State to co-chair political campaigns (or otherwise assist or favor them).
Katherine Harris wore both those hats in Florida in 2000, and, four years later, so did Ken Blackwell in Ohio and Jan Brewer in Arizona. Such Republicans should not have been allowed to do it, nor should any Democrats.

12. Make election fraud a major felony, with life imprisonment–and disenfranchisement–for all repeat offenders.
“Three strikes and you’re out” would certainly befit so serious a crime against democracy.

This comes from Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy, 2000-2008, a new collection of writings by the major Election Integrity people, which IG Publishing will be bringing out in early April.

The issue existing with the ” corporate owned ” software is simply that we are prohibited from inspecting the voting process. Therefore the rest is conjecture, Yes,there very well could be issues, as CAVO’s Beth Clarkson points out. However, due to the protections around the code, we’ll never know for sure. That’s the argument for open source software– see http://www.cavo-us.org Smaller hand counting comparisons do not prove conclusively prove up any suspicions, but are relevant. Unfortunately hand count results are not tamper proof either. Better reformists agree best security is achieved by General Public License open source in conjunction with hand countable paper ballot printing systems

If you want to win the presidency and elect a revolutionary congress, you must find a way to force accurate counts of votes across the country. There is no reason to believe that machine generated vote counts are accurate when they are not checked for accuracy. This is particularly difficult in places like South Carolina and parts of Kansas, where no paper trail exists to even attempt a public recount. Or Arizona where manual hand counting of ballots is not permitted.

I live in Kansas. I’m a professional statistician and an ASQ Certified Quality Engineer. I find certain patterns in election results quite disturbing. Graphs of Oklahoma primary results are below. Both exhibit a common and concerning pattern: as the number of votes cast in a precinct increases, so does the vote share for the candidate favored by the Washington establishment. This pattern is NOT due to random chance nor do voter demographics explain it. In the fall, the Republican candidates across the board can be expected to show such a pattern wherever machine counting of votes is combined with poor to non-existent auditing of those results. The pattern is consistent with election rigging.

Citizens like myself have had little success in forcing our officials to show the paper trails so we can have confidence in their reported results. I’ve been trying for more than three years to get access to the paper records that would allow me to assess how accurate our computer tabulated official vote counts are. After my latest legal setback, it will be another year before I might get permission. In the meantime, we will be having another election on non-transparent voting machines.

You, as a candidate, have the right to demand manual recounts. Well, in some places anyway. If you were to do so, irrefutable evidence of problems with vote counts will emerge in some of those places. If and only if your supporters can find and correct those problems can your revolution win at the ballot box.

In states that have paper trails, I suggest you start asking for manual recounts of the paper ballots and Voter Verified Paper Audit Trails (VVPAT) where you can. Whether you won or lost the contest doesn’t matter. The point is to evaluate the size and number of discrepancies and check for bias. Laws vary from state to state. Typically there is a short window of time to request recounts. Many jurisdictions will balk and try to keep you from doing so by various legal maneuvers. But there will be many opportunities through the primary season. You have supporters that can be trained and provide labor hours when needed. A 100% manual recount isn’t necessary. A random sample of precincts is sufficient.

If you recount and find discrepancies, you might receive additional delegates. More importantly, if you were to demand recounts, it would highlight the fact that in many states, those machine counts are never audited or verified with the original paper records. Most citizens are shocked to discover that their vote counting process is not verified, or in some places, verifiable. I know I was when I first discovered this truth about Sedgwick County Kansas in 2012.

Thank you

Beth Clarkson
…………….

And, about the fraud of those Superdelegates that Clinton claims to have:

It was and is a complete fabrication. Another way of putting it would be fraud. Initiated by Clinton and the DNC and unfortunately aided and abetted by two ignorant AP reporters (and others like CNN) who didn’t know ( or maybe didn’t care) that they were being snookered and simply swallowed what was thrown at them. It would help if people who actually think they are reporters would check DNC rules regarding the use of super delegates. Especially since there has only been one time in the history of the Democratic party that super delegates ever cast a vote and that was 32 years ago in 1984. And even then it was to affirm the candidate who won the most pledged delegates in the primaries.

snip
So why is Hillary Clinton putting out the fiction that she is ahead on delegates even though she isn’t because of super delegates? Because she is being underhanded and so is the DNC run by Debbie Wasserman-Schultz Obama’s hand picked chair of the DNC who are trying to build a phony aura of expectation and inevitability and the illusion that she will be the nominee and then if she doesn’t have the actual votes from the primary battles try and steal the nomination by using super delegates with Obama and Wasserman-Schultz driving the getaway car.

The New York Times acting like the long arm of the law put their arm on Clinton in a recent editorial making it clear that super delegates can have no role in the outcome of the nomination which needs to be decided by whoever wins the most delegates in the primaries.

snip
Make it clear that if Clinton can’t win honestly she is not going to win at all.

snip
NOTE: CNN is still showing super delegate totals for Clinton included with her pledged delegate totals that don’t actually exist and may never exist and for now and until the convention and they are cast, if ever, are pure fiction. John King is one of the worst offenders but so is Wolf Blitzer. The Sanders campaign needs to hold them and other media outlets accountable.
………

Yes, absolutely. How do we begin the process of getting a recount in Michigan, and how do we put the hand-count protocol in place for all future primaries… beginning with today’s primary results in Michigan?

If we don’t insist on hand-count verification of the results, it will be another stolen election.

There will be no recounts.
We get NO recounts.
There are different rules and laws governing election recounts in every race in every state, and in almost every case the results must put two candidates to usually UNDER 2% from each other. If that condition – and all others – are not met then a recount WILL NOT be allowed. And in cases where it’s an actual election as opposed to a primary then the LAW states no recount without conditions being met and you can’t even sue – because it’s the law.
To quote David Letterman: “We’re SCREWED!”
This FARCE of a voting system will never be addressed by those in power until mass numbers of citizens start going to polling places and smashing the electronic voting machines with hammers.

“Corporate owned.” Doesn’t anybody get it? You can stop right there. Has anyone forgotten the “hanging chads” in Florida that gave us, “Dubya”, the moron president and his evil running mate, Dick Cheney, the butcher of Bagdad? Now let’s talk about the neo-Nazi-con SCOTUS. As long as wealth runs everything, democracy is finished. This is WHY the American Revolution was fought 240 years ago!

4) There shall be equal requirements for placing
candidates name on the ballot by the individual
candidate only. Political parties and other
groups shall not be allowed to place names of
candidates on the ballot.

It appears to me that the “Super Delegate” system is exactly a Political party placing candidates on the ballot.

I don’t doubt the possibility of voter fraud in this or any other case, however as was stated before in this particular case it is not wrong to assume bernie would win in wide margins in rural areas. And metropolitan areas tend to favor the most mainstream candidate.

I read a voter fraud story that was circulating in more mainstream media about the kentucky governor’s race with the discrepancy being voting down the ticket, which was mostly for democrats, but the governor’s race went to the republican. That story didn’t really catch fire either.

The thing is people don’t go looking for information and the pursuit of truth isn’t on the top of the average american’s list of important things.

Or maybe it was because voter fraud was proven in the 2000, accepted by portions of the mainstream media and it didn’t change anything.

Still, there needs to be a way for this information to cross over from small internet press conspiracy theory to mainstream media, even if in the far left sense like mother jones, the nation, huffington post or something similar.

I have found that while the mainstream media is not usually accurate about the world, the reality is that because most people rely on mainstream media that ends up being the accurate view of the world or rather the only one you can have a conversation about with most people.

We need more transparency in voting and a system of checks an S. Perhaps actual humans not only counting but another person checking the accuracy. Say an elections officials doing the official count and random people from the voting public checking their results.

Although corruption could still creep in so in this digital age there could easily be a way that you log your vote with a unique id number all results including who voted for who with this anonymous number should then be able to be checked on line. That way you personally can check and know that your vote went to the right person.

Finally I think we need more voting power regarding policies and new law. Just electing officials to make all the decisions leaves so much room for corruption. Again easily achieved in this age the public needs to be part of voting on a bill. Maybe after a bill goes through congress and the president we should all give our say. If everyone can vote on American Idol why not things that actually affect our lives.

If you get a moment check out Hacking Democracy about the 2000 and 2004 rigged elections. It plays out pretty like this all but assuring this has been happening for sometime and is widespread.

I think if you know anything about the demographics and voting habits of Massachusetts, it’s pretty obvious that the discrepancy is entirely explainable by that, no (tremendously irresponsible) suggestion of voter fraud needed to explain it.

I agree completely that hand-counting is the way to go – and I’m a software engineer who has contemplated how you’d build an electronic voting machine to the point of having an email conversation with Jonathan Schwarz, the CEO of Sun Microsystems when I worked there. If you must have them, there are ways you could have some chance of them being trustworthy, starting with all of the software *and hardware* involved being open source and audible by the public at any moment during their operation, make as much of the state of the machine externally observable as possible in difficult-to-forge ways – and no operating manufacturer of voting machines is anywhere near doing any of those things. But if you do have a choice, the convenience of having an instant tally is in no way worth the myriad ways to compromise the electoral process they open up.

I live in one of the hand-count towns, Shutesbury, MA – and the outstanding characteristic of the hand-count towns is that they’re tiny. The politics of towns like these is so different from suburbs of Boston that they might as well be on different planets.

The implication of this article – that there was voter fraud favoring Hillary Clinton – is only believable if you know so little about Massachusetts that you’re able to believe Massachusetts towns are homogenous, interchangeable units. Apply Occam’s Razor – there are far simpler explanations than voter fraud for the 2016 MA Democratic primary.

There are very real problems with electronic voting, potential problems with mechanical systems, and there are real examples of highly statistically improbable results where these technologies are used. Those cases need a LOT of public attention drawing them – nobody should trust the results of the electronic voting machines currently in use in the US, period.

Articles like this, where someone just doesn’t like the outcome of the election and wants to suggest nefarious explanations muddy the waters in a really unhelpful way. There are real, catastrophic problems with electronic voting. Someone crying wolf when they don’t like the outcome of an election only makes the cases where there is real evidence of fraud less credible, and leads the public to ignore an issue that really shouldn’t be.

There’s a tremendously irresponsible reliance on vendors to handle the database files and tabulations. So a disparity of that size should at least be checked by hand count audits of a few of the most suspect Dominion precincts. That would be the responsible thing to do.

Tim wrote: “The implication of this article – that there was voter fraud favoring Hillary Clinton – is only believable if you know so little about Massachusetts that you’re able to believe Massachusetts towns are homogenous, interchangeable units.”

Thanks, I was going to make the same point. The implication that the rest of the state, including Boston, would provide similar vote counts to small, rural towns in MA if only the votes were counted by hand instead of machine is nonsense.

This was posted just after the NY primaries. by John Poundstone
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The reasons for this “loss” are quite simple. In Nov and Dec last year the Dem Party database firewall went down on 3 occasions. On the last occurance a former Clinton employee who was placed within the Sanders Campaign staff as manager of their own database, with recommendation from the DNC, within the Dem Party overall voter database, “downloaded” a portion of Clinton’s voter database. This “inside job” created a false story that hid the actions of the Clinton Campaign, who in all likelihood accessed the complete Sander’s voter database and used that as a basis to organize a purge of Sander’s voters from Ohio, Arizona, NY (as well as more states past and to come).

Also note that tonight’s poll results, just like Ohio and Arizona are being reported as static % voting for Clinton over Sanders with a 21% lead. This is an impossibility tonight just as it was in the previous two “odd” elections where exit polling (usually highly accurate) shows a small vote differential or 3-6%. In truth the states different regions and precincts votes in very different patterns than the static 21% being shown. In some Clinton win by 60-40, in others Bernie won 60-40…and larger variable % differences have already been individually reported. If those were being accurately reported in the major media counts, the % difference between the candidates would be jumping around dramatically. The very static nature of the % the media is reporting is a definitive sign of collusion between the DNC/Clinton camps and those major media news outlets.

Why do I say this, I have been an election observer in 4 major, highly disputed elections in Africa over the last 15 years. In each one of these the US State Dept, CIA, EU observer teams, UN observer teams and even local African NGO observer teams looked at this exact relationship between poll reporting % in the government controlled or ruling party controlled media as a sign of massive vote fraud. This single issue was raised in each of those elections pwhere I was an observer and was used by Hillary Clinton’s own State Dept as an excuse to declare that election in question as “not free and fair” or as an out right fraud against the people of that country. She knows the playbook well…she just defrauded the people if NY and the US with this same strategy here, with the collusion of the US major media.

THIS INFORMATION IS WRONG. I am from Massachusetts and worked many hours as a campaign volunteer during the time when the Bernie office was open before Super Tuesday and know first-hand the real reason why Bernie lost our state by a small margin.

FIrst of all, the only “machines” that we use in Boston, where Bernie lost big, are scanners. We fill out paper ballots then put them into a scanner. The paper ballots are kept for verification.

The real reason why Bernie lost in the large cities and won in the small towns is this: The senior staff of the campaign (likely infiltrated with Hillary supporters) systematically disregarded outreach both from and to communities of color. With little information about Bernie, black and Latino people voted for Hillary. Another sector that voted for Hillary was affluent white people (no big surprise there). The people who voted for Bernie in large numbers were white people who live in towns that are struggling economically (because of the massive departure of factories in the global economy).

I had first-hand knowledge of the strategy of the official campaign. They kept all of us volunteers busy phone banking (or going to NH to canvas). Some of us provided contacts with key people in black and Latino communities, but, after thanking us profusely, the senior staff did not follow up with those people. In addition, people of color who personally reached out to the campaign staff were rebuffed. During GOTV was the first time that we were encouraged to canvas in these communities. This was too little too late, and we were given generic flyers. But we saw Hillary signs all over the place and colorful Hillary voter cards with all kinds of promises about what she would do to help black people. This is why I have been urging people in other states not to phone bank but instead to do their own outreach to black and Latino communities.

A lot of us don’t see the circumstances you relate to us as the sole contributing factor for such a huge point spread. Please study why the electronic tabulation through Diebold and ES&S scanners are unreliable. There is plenty of expert testimony and research that demonstrates how an election can be rigged through these machines. This is not cool, especially when you have the elections department in Boston admitting to deferring all handling of database files to the vendors.
For all of the territories using these machines, the ballots need to be physically separated by precinct and a hand count audit needs to include a statistically significant sample size. That way we can confirm that the percentages are solely attributed to your various anecdotes along the campaign trail.

Every day I work with geographic and demographic data and let me tell you that this kind of analysis is what happens when people who really, really want to believe something try to find an explanation why something they didn’t want to happen happened.

I could break this down but let me keep it simple. Above it says, “68 out of the state’s 351 jurisdictions used hand counted ballots…” I only found 66 places that hand count ballots, but put that aside. Assuming what they said is true, that Bernie got about 17% more votes in jurisdictions that hand counted rather than using machine read ballots, what can we conclude from that? They seem to conclude that Bernie should have won big in Massachusetts and that there was skullduggery in the machine count.

However, there’s a far simpler explanation. There’s a reason why only 68 (or 66) out of 351 jurisdictions use hand counting. The handcounters are all in very, very small towns. For example, three towns in Dukes County, MA hand count their ballots. Those 3 towns make up 7.5% of the population of Dukes. They overwhelmingly voted for Bernie, about 58% voted for him. He got a total of 315 votes in those 3 towns.He also won the County with about 54% of the vote. In fact, he did about the same in the machine counted jurisdictions as he did in the hand counted jurisdictions! Isn’t that strange?

No, it’s not. Dukes County is an island, Martha’s Vineyard is located there. Bernie did very well. But do not make the mistake of thinking Bernie should have gotten 58% of the vote in the whole state or even 54% of the vote in the whole state. Dukes County is not the same as Boston. It’s very, very wealthy and very, very white. It’s not the same as the counties Hillary won, it doesn’t resemble them at all.

Hillary won in Boston by 20,000 votes, completely wiping out Bernie’s 500 vote win in Dukes County. Dos anyone really believe if the vote in Boston was hand counted it would be just like Dukes County’s votes? Can you explain to me why you believe that?

Yes, small rural towns in Massachusetts did not vote the same way that large, diverse towns in Massachusetts voted. Is that difference due to machine counting ballots? No. It’s because there are very different groups of voters in the large cities and the tiny towns.

Then let’s do a hand count audit of the machine counted precincts. Let’s determine whether weighted averages were used in the vote-by-mail tallies. Refer to the final sentence of this article:

“Regardless of who your prize candidate may be, it’s time to get on your hind legs and demand verifiable transparent elections, especially if your candidate is not the establishment’s choice.”

I love to hear all the hard facts about how there could be no shenanigans, but, in addition to compelling arguments suggesting a lack of foul play, I would insist we have transparent, verifiable elections, which is currently not the case in Massachusetts.

The reality is that I don’t “really, really want to believe” anything that is not verifiable and transparent.